BROOMBALL: Broomball Lowers The Boom

Written By: Reilly Capps

A competitive town full of world-class athletes, former athletes and wanna-be athletes, Telluride is not fooling around. Telluride thinks it can beat you in a footrace. Telluride thinks it can do more push ups than you. Telluride will beat you two times out of three at hopscotch, tiddlywinks and paper-rock-scissors.

Telluride has the ability to take any sport seriously, no matter how stupid it may seem.

There is a game called broomball, which is familiar to people from the upper Midwest but which, to the rest of the country, looks pretty much like hockey in an insane asylum.

There are no skates, few pads and no sticks. Instead, you push a little blue ball around with a broom. That is, when you're not flat on your tush or on your face, scrambling to get back up.

Falling down and getting hurt is a big part of broomball. It's a sport not recommended for those without comprehensive health insurance.

Still, it's as competitive as anything they had in the Coliseum. There's cheating: people dip their brooms in glue to make them stiffer, and they lodge pebbles in their soles to make them grip the ice. There's checking: though technically illegal, knocking your opponent into the boards is merely a sign that you want it more. There's trash talking: I once heard a guy threaten one of his best friends with a broom, saying he would use it to sweep out his, uh, innards.

Of course, those guys went out for a beer afterwards.

Though they probably turned that into a contest, too.